Why does the review of my taxes show "Dividend Income Worksheet: Payer has too many characters."

[potterhead99]

@mlblaker mine did this as well - I use Robinhood so the original text from the 1099 was " Robinhood Markets Inc. as agent for Robinhood Securities LLC." I shortened it to just "Robinhood Markets Inc." in the payer box, hopefully this helps if you haven't already solved your issue!

[gingerfox]

"Morgan Stanley Capital" was the winner for mine which shortened it substantially.

[cwoods1]

Most often it is due to the very long names of the company.   By shortening the name or leaving off the Inc or LLC on the ends of many of these will clear out your problem.  This especially seems to always happen when completing an Iowa state return. 

[jackmichele]

This exact error from turbo tax happened to me.  The fix :  1st- go to your forms and select the fed. dividend form--I only had one div. form from 'Financial Services...'  which I deleted that name and put in 'fidelity' only.  Then I went back to state e-file and it transmitted the return!!  It e-filed the state return after I finally figured out that it was the dividend form with" too many characters ". I changed the payer name to a shorter name.  Right or wrong it worked.  It was turbo taxes fault because it 'auto-filled'  that "too many characters" name!!  Mike

[MJH10]

Like those above my error says "Error payer name on a dividend worksheet is blank. But the Review sheet that is shown is the Information Worksheet and the suffix box is highlighted rather than a Dividend worksheet.   The payer name on the dividend worksheet is NOT blank.  And the payer name is NOT too long. And I have cleared the suffix field on the Info worksheet using the delete and backspace keys.

[BellvueBD]

Same issue with my Iowa state tax return.

[MJH10]

UPDATE:  I worked over the phone with a TT rep for 1 1/2 hours.  She could not solve the problem.  She said she thought it is an error in the programming code and that she would escalate the problem to the next level of support.  When I asked what the "case number" would be for the escalation, she said it was the same one that she and I had.  BUT after the call was finished I received an email from TT  asking me to complete a survey about how the call went.  And that email said the case had been CLOSED.      Also, I have searched all the forms included in my return and could not even find a form precisely titled "Dividend Income Worksheet".

[MJH10]

UPDATE: talked with TT again today for 1 1/2 hours.  They found the problem.  On on 1099-DIV that TT imported from a financial institution, the boxes that had no $ amounts in them had 0.00 entered in them. (Again, this is due to TT's import.  I did not type in 0.00).  I was told to "blank" all of those boxes instead of the 0.00.  Then the error about "Payer name on Dividend Income Worksheet cannot be left blank" went away.  And I was able to e-file both federal and Iowa returns. 

[MJH10]

Please see my last UPDATE for a possible solution to your problem.

[deads]

I'm having the same problem with Iowa. Did you ever get yours figured out?

[MJH10]

Yes I did.  Please see MJH10 UPDATE post just two posts above your post/question

[DocHeartless1]

I can confirm with an Iowa return, that it wound up being the Dividend worksheets.  I changed my 'Charles Schwab Co & Inc' and 'Vanguard Marketing Company Fiduciary Company' down to 'Schwab' and 'Vanguard.'  It went through no problem after that change.  Bizarre that it looks like it has to do with the Suffix portion of your name, but it's really some totally different worksheet.  

[MJH10]

Thanks Docheartless1 for confirming that shortening the payer name solved the issue for you.  In my case it was the same error message but  the error was generated because on one of my 1099-Div there were 0.00s in various boxes and TT doesn't accept that.  TT wants the boxes left blank.   Besides giving a totally wrong error message (which TT needs to fix) I would like to point out that when TT imports the data from a financial institution, TT ALLOWS the name to be too long when it is imported (instead of automatically shortening it), AND it only throws an error way later when your getting ready to e-file.  The same thing with the 0.00s.  They were put into the boxes by the import not by me, but again TT allows the import to enters 0.00s instead of making  the boxes blank.  And again  it doesn't throw the error until much later in the process.  TT really needs to clean up their sloppy programming.

[taxhistorian]

Thank you so much to everyone here for posting these solutions. I'm a longtime TurboTax user, but new to Iowa filing.  My taxes are complex this year due to some inheritance issues. I had to shorten multiple institutional names on the DIV worksheets and eliminate many 0.00s, before it all cleared out.  

I suspect this is an issue with Iowa's filing system (that it can't handle longer institutional names and the zeros) but even if that is the case TurboTax should be able to anticipate it as an issue and provide much better guidance for the fix.  The guidance as it stands makes no sense at all. Thank goodness for these community boards. Users are ahead of TurboTax.

[Billonlin02]

Bingo!  Thank you!  It was frustrating but at least I only spent no more than 30 minutes wrestling with it.  I should have checked the Intuit  community board right away.